The Natural Contemplative

08 December 2017

On the longest night of the year, we invite you to this annual program of contemplative music
and silence featuring Celtic and original music by Coracle (Cynthia Hughes, Celtic harp; John Crockett, whistles
and soundscapes).

Coracle's
music is inspired by the sea and the land, the many voices of the Earth, by the
cycle of the seasons and by the stillness of contemplation. We invite you to
reconnect with the spirit of this magical time of the year, the time of deepest
darkness and the returning of the light.

14 November 2017

The most recent issues of Right Whale News (Volume 25; Number 4) and the 2017 right whale status Report Card are sobering to say the least. The litany of bad news for North Atlantic right whales is relentless.

16 whales are known to have died, primarily from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. That represents 3% of the population in one year.

The birth of new whales was extremely low this year: only 5 births, compared to the average of 20.

There were no new mothers observed this year, and there are only 100 breeding females.

With the addition of this year's data, the average calving interval has also increased, from 4 years to 10 years.

The official estimate of the North Atlantic population dropped this year from 529 to 451, because the method of estimating had to be changed due to the fact that it is becoming harder to find and observe the population. Until a few years ago, a large portion of the population appeared every year in the Bay of Fundy, so the total population could be reliably estimated based on those observations. That is no longer true, and the newer method shows the total population has been declining since 2010.

This all adds up to very bad news for right whales. At current rates of mortality, right whales could be functionally extinct (no more breeding females) in twenty years. The biggest threat to right whales now is entanglement in fishing gear. Human demand for fish and lobster and crabs is running head-on into the survival of North Atlantic right whales. Over the years, many attempts have been made to introduce new gear that is less dangerous to whales, but that costs money. Fish abundance is declining, which means greater fishing effort is needed to catch the same number of fish.

But right whales are also threatened by ship strikes, by ocean pollution, by noise pollution and by global warming. There is no easy way to save the right whales. Doing so requires fundamental changes in human behavior. We have to care as much about them as we do about ourselves, and be willing to change how we live, in order that they may continue to live.

14 October 2017

As of October, the number of dead right whales found in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence has risen to twelve, including four females. An
additional three have been found in U.S. waters. At least six were hit
by ships and at least one entangled in crab-fishing gear.

09 July 2017

Seven North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) have been found dead in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the last month. Two probably from being hit by ships and one from entanglement in fishing gear. The cause of death in the other four is not known at this time.

North Atlantic right whales are already highly endangered, and the loss of even one, especially a female, increases the risk of extinction. It's very hard to do piecemeal protection for these animals. When ship strikes were rising in the Bay of Fundy, a lengthy regulatory process led to moving the shipping lanes through the Bay to avoid right whale areas. That was a success, but soon thereafter, the whales abandoned the Bay of Fundy due to lack of food there and seem to have moved north. Now we are seeing the same problem in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

We are not dealing with one isolated problem. Global shipping, increased fishing effort to secure a dwindling supply of fish, and global warming all contribute. Here's what I see as the bottom line: are we willing to radically alter our way of life (e.g. dramatically reduce global shipping, with all of the economic consequences of that) to allow creatures like right whales to survive? Or are we too committed to our own ways to allow these creatures to live?

Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to that question. We need a spiritual revolution, a radical change in our most fundamental beliefs and behaviors. But I don't know what it will take to bring that about.

07 July 2017

Contemplative ecology is founded upon an encounter with a realm that is
difficult to talk about, the core realm of the contemplative life: the realm of
emptiness or silence or stillness or nothingness.

Contemplation is a way of facing oneself at the deepest levels, and perhaps
to see through all in the human mind that is illusory, destructive and
life-defeating. Without society's distractions, we come face to face with
ourselves in our actuality, including those unappealing aspects of ourselves
and our culture that our busyness, our compulsiveness, our conformity to social
norms, and our immersion in entertainment usually obscure. We face all of the
ways in which we have unconsciously internalized our culture's norms of belief
and behavior. Ultimately, we have to face our emptiness.

Emptiness is the essential nonexistence of the self that
believes it is separate from everything else, but it is also much more than
that. Emptiness is the immeasurable. Emptiness often comes as the encounter
with something you cannot fully comprehend: a deep love, or a terrible loss;
the arrival or departure of another life; or the inscrutable nature of your own
mind. Emptiness is the visceral recognition that your existence is not separate
from the existence of everything else, that everything exists in
interrelationship and interdependence, and that reality cannot be controlled or
managed or experienced or understood in its vital actuality. The mind can't
grasp it. It's too big; it's too complex; it's too dynamic; it's too alive.
Emptiness is the encounter with the unfathomable, living presence of
everything.

Touched by the infinitely unknowable, nothing can ever be the same.
Life is so much more than this petty little mind.

The power of the encounter with reality is not in the description. The
attempt to describe it usually requires negative terms like silence, emptiness, nothingness, stillness. These are entirely inadequate words to describe the
whole of unfathomable reality. What they point to is that we are filled with
our beliefs and memories and worldviews, and usually need to be emptied of them
in order to come into contact with the reality of the living world. That living
world is always right at hand, but it remains eclipsed by the mind's ideas
about it.

The encounter with emptiness reorients the organism. Much more needs to be
said about emptiness - what it is, what it means, why encountering it turns our
lives upside down and inside out, why we fear it - but there is little that can
be said. How can emptiness be described? It can't. You have to go there.
Talking about emptiness accomplishes nothing. Being touched by emptiness
changes everything. Discovering the hollowness or emptiness of the self
collapses the foundation of the exploitative psycho-social system and reorients
life toward life itself, the whole movement of life.

What emptiness emphatically is not, is some kind of esoteric experience that
comes as the result of years of spiritual training. Emptiness is not something
we can obtain or lose. It is not having a quiet mind or being "in the
flow." It is not spaciousness or openness. It is not a heightened state of
awareness or consciousness. Emptiness is not a state of mind. It cannot be
experienced.

It's really quite simple and straightforward. It's right at hand. Emptiness
is what is, regardless of what we think
about it or how we experience it. We can acknowledge it or we can try, and
ultimately fail, to deny it. That is all. Emptiness—unfathomable reality—undoes
everything we try to do. It ruins all of our plans and hopes and schemes. It is
everywhere and everywhen and everything, yet when it reveals itself, it comes
like a thief saying, "Nothing persists. Nothing you believe is true.
Nothing you experience is real. Nothing belongs to you, not even your self, not
even your life." And civilization crumbles, founded as it is on the belief
that treasures can be stored up and kept safe for the immortal self. Emptiness
is a direct and immediate affront to the feeling that I exist, that I can be
protected, that I can be perfected. Emptiness contradicts all of the stories we
tell about the self and the other. Emptiness takes everything away from us that
we wish to possess, including our sense of identity. And so we push emptiness
away. We avoid it with our noise and activity. Minute by minute we reinforce
the feeling of being a separate self (the words "separate" and
"self" come from the same root) through our mental and physical
activity. When we stop and listen, and especially when we listen to the natural
world, emptiness is right here. Emptiness is what remains when I stop. It is
very simple, but because most of us never stop, it's revolutionary when we do.

Our current society does not serve life. It serves the separate self. Can we
see that serving the self is delusional? The self does not deserve our
devotion. It does not deserve the commitment of our life energy to its
maintenance and enlargement. Nor does society deserve that devotion, nor any
group, nor any belief system. Only reality, the whole of life, deserves that.
The life devoted to the whole movement of life (which, make no mistake,
includes every individual) is a rare and beautiful thing. Few of us seem able
to go there. Devotion to self keeps reasserting itself. Those who do go there,
even briefly, will also know about emptiness. Like the outer and the inner,
wholeness and emptiness travel together. They are the yang and the yin of the
way of existence. You can't have one without the other.

Many people find the idea of emptiness frightening or depressing. We are
afraid to learn the truth about ourselves. We do not want to know that all of
our striving is for nothing. Contemplation is bad news for the separate self,
but good news for life. What one finds when stripped to the core is not evil,
but a blessing: the communion of reality beyond words; easing at last the
generations of fear and pain we have been inflicting on ourselves and the
world.

--An Introduction to Contemplative Ecology, of which this is an excerpt, can be read in its entirety here.

06 July 2017

The following is a modified version of the final part of the post The Whole World Is Sacred. I am reposting that part because it is a good summary of what I am trying to communicate.

--

The human presence on Earth has become so dysfunctional; our ways of living and working, of growing and catching food, of making things, of gathering the resources to make things, and our ways of disposing of those things are so fundamentally out of harmony with natural, life-giving processes, and so destructive to the basis of life, that we must be utterly changed, inwardly and outwardly, in our sense of identity and in the structures of our societies. New technologies and a few policy changes are insufficient and often merely perpetuate the problem in a new form.

We need an ecological spiritual revolution: a complete change of heart and mind, a reorientation at the deepest levels of psyche and society. The nature of that revolution is what I have tried to articulate in this blog and my other writing and workshops: see that we are deeply out of touch with reality because our beliefs distort reality; see that I am no thing (empty), and therefore everything (whole); see that everything is sacred; listen to the animals; be devoted to the well being of the whole movement of life.

Contrast those with what I think characterize our dominant perspective: my beliefs form the core of my identity - I'll kill to defend them if I have to; I am an individual, autonomous self, and that self reigns supreme; My life and the lives of those related to me or close to me are of great value, but everything else is of value only if it is useful to me and my kin and my nation or wherever I happen to draw the boundary of my "self" (and it is a very flexible boundary, although we fail to recognize that).

A complete reversal of orientation has become a matter of survival. I have tried to describe where I think that reorientation comes from, and to make clear that it is possible, but it remains elusive at best. It is a reorientation in which nothing needs to change for everything to change. It is not something that comes as a result of anything we do; it comes when we stop all of our doing and see things as they are. The truth is right at hand waiting for us to recognize it and be changed by it.

03 July 2017

This is tragic news for this extremely vulnerable and magnificent species. Right whales have abandoned the Bay of Fundy due to lack of food there and are apparently moving north. What is going on in the Gulf of St. Lawrence?

'Unprecedented event': 6 North Atlantic right whales found dead in June

'The loss of even one animal is huge with animals with a population this small,' says marine biologist.

I have spent my life asking questions about our place on Earth; working for peace, social justice and environmental conservation; living a contemplative, listening life; and sharing my experiences through writing and education. I have studied the vocal behavior of marine mammals and songbirds. I now devote much of my time to recording natural soundscapes and composing and performing music that is inspired by those soundscapes.
The environmental situation is critical, and solutions are urgently needed that touch the deepest levels of who we think we are, how we view the world, and how our actions mirror those beliefs.